PhD Studentship on ATLAS

A Ph.D. studentship is available on the ATLAS experiment at CERN with the University of Warwick Particle Physics group. The Ph.D. project will cover two areas:

High momentum Higgs studies. The dominant Higgs boson production mechanism at LHC involves fusing two gluons via a loop diagram. This loop is dominated by off-shell top quarks, but could also include new heavier particles. The production of high momentum Higgs bosons is sensitive to the presence of new high-mass particles. This Ph.D. project will be to measure the Higgs transverse momentum spectrum at the highest momenta that can be achieved. To study such a rare production process, the most abundant decay mode will be employed: H->bb. The student will be be able to use the huge data set currently being recorded in LHC Run 2 (2015-2018). It will be important to develop techniques for separating these signatures from background processes, and use the more common Z->bb decay as a test-bed.

A Ph.D. on ATLAS involves taking on a responsibility for detector operations or upgrade. There are three related projects which would fit with this analysis:

exploring the most effective menu items to trigger such data in Run 3, and work in their integration into the menu,

work on improving the performance at high-momentum of "b-tagging" algorithms which separate b-quarks from light quarks.

Studies of the performance for high-pT jets of the replacement tracker, 'ITK', which is being prepared for 2023